FLAT 13B

THE SILENCE

The sign above the guard desk was scrawled in blood-red ink, like someone had carved it with their fingernails: 'DO NOT REWIND CCTV FOOTAGE BEYOND 24 HOURS. NO EXCEPTIONS.'

Kiaan Kapoor, 23, fresh out of engineering college with a degree worth less than toilet paper, felt his fingers twitch every time he read those words. The night shift at Skyview Towers in Sector 18, Noida paid just enough to keep Inaaya's heart beating. His little sister's condition was not getting better, and the doctors sure as hell were not getting cheaper.

Rules were rules. But when your sister is counting on you, rules become suggestions you can ignore.

Falguni Arora from Flat 13B made breaking them feel right. Every night at 12:13 AM sharp, she would appear with chai in a steel thermos, cardamom steam curling like incense around her tired face. Her blue cotton sari reminded him of the dupatta Inaaya wore to festivals, back when she could still dance. Her smile carried the warmth of every mother he had never had.

"This place swallows good people, beta," she had whispered last Tuesday, pressing the warm cup into his hands. "Stay sharp. Stay alive."

Tonight, her light was off. Flat 13B sat dark on the CCTV monitor, corridor empty as a grave at midnight. Kiaan's stomach twisted with the same sick feeling from when Inaaya collapsed at school, her lips turning blue, gasping for air that would not come.

He glanced at the blood-red sign. One peek. Nobody would know.

The guardroom fluorescent flickered once, twice. Somewhere in the building's concrete depths, he heard the faint jingle of silver anklets. His skin prickled, a wave of nausea hitting him like he had swallowed something rotten.

"Just paranoia," he muttered, and pressed rewind.

The footage rolled backward in jerky, pixelated chunks. 12:13 AM yesterday. There he was in his plastic chair, raising a steel cup to his lips, smiling at something off-camera nodding like he was listening to the world's most interesting story.

But Falguni was not there.

No blue sari. No thermos. No gentle smile that made his chest feel less hollow.

Just Kiaan, drinking chai alone, talking to empty air like a complete lunatic.

Nausea hit him sharp and metallic. A gold-plated pen sat on his desk, ornate and expensive, engraved with "Dev" in Hindi script. He had never seen it before. It had not been there five minutes ago.

When he reached for it, the metal burned his fingertips like ice. Blood welled up, dark and warm. The pen moved by itself, scratching across his notepad in jerky, desperate strokes:

'You died here.'

Kiaan dropped it like it was on fire. The guardroom felt colder now, the monitor's electronic hum louder, more insistent. Like something was trying to speak through the static.

"What the hell?" he whispered. His voice echoed strangely in the small room, bouncing off walls that suddenly felt too close.

The pen rolled off the desk. When it hit the concrete floor, it shattered like glass, leaving behind only a smear of something that looked disturbingly like dried blood.

THE LEDGER

Sleep would not come after that. Days blurred into sleepless nights, time thick and heavy as monsoon mud that clings to your boots and drags you down. Kiaan could not stop rewinding the footage. Every night, same result. Falguni did not exist.

He asked Viraj, the day supervisor. Viraj was a chain-smoking techie with permanent dark circles and fingers stained yellow from cheap cigarettes, the kind of guy who had seen too much and trusted too little.

"Flat 13B?" Viraj's laugh was harsh, like gravel scraping concrete. "Been empty since 2001, yaar. Old widow died in a kitchen fire. Tragic stuff." His voice dropped to barely above whisper. "My sister used to work security here too. Vanished one night, left everything behind. Her chai was still warm on the desk."

He studied Kiaan's face with eyes that had seen too many night shifts. "You look familiar though. Too familiar. Do not dig where you should not, bhai."

The words hit Kiaan like a slap. His chest tightened, made breathing feel like drowning. He stopped eating properly, stopped calling the hospital to check on Inaaya's condition. The guilt sat on his shoulders like a weight he could not shake off.

The CCTV footage began glitching. Static screamed across the screens at random intervals, timestamps running backward like time itself was coming undone. Sometimes he would catch glimpses of faces in the grain, morphing into Inaaya's pale features from her hospital bed, her eyes pleading with him from behind the pixelated snow.

Last night, he watched a child from Flat 7C step into the elevator at 1:03 AM. A little girl in a pink nightgown, dragging a stuffed rabbit behind her. The doors closed with their usual mechanical sigh.

When they opened on the ground floor thirty seconds later, she was gone.

Just an empty elevator and a stuffed rabbit lying on its side, one button eye staring at the camera like an accusation.

Behind the guard desk, wedged between loose floorboards that creaked when he walked, he found a tarnished silver locket. The metal was warm to the touch, almost alive. Engraved initials: F.A.

The moment his skin made contact, fire shot up his arm like lightning. A memory flashed behind his eyes — harsh hospital lights, machines beeping, and Inaaya's small voice pleading: "Bhaiya, do not leave me alone."

But this locket was not his. The memory felt borrowed, like something that had happened to someone else. Someone who might have looked exactly like him.

That is when he decided to break into Flat 13B.

THE VAULT

The lock picked easier than it should have. The door swung open with a groan that sounded almost human.

The air inside reeked of jasmine and ash, thick enough to choke on. Sweet and bitter at the same time, like flowers left too long on a grave. The walls seemed to pulse with a heartbeat that definitely was not his own, a rhythm just slightly off from normal, like a damaged drum.

A cracked mirror in the narrow hallway showed his reflection, but wrong. Bloodied. Falling backward through jagged glass, mouth open in a scream that made no sound. For just a second, he saw himself hitting concrete three floors below, bones snapping like dry twigs.

He staggered away from it, the locket burning against his palm like a coal. The taste of copper filled his mouth. Somewhere in the apartment's depths, a whisper slipped through the walls like smoke:

"Bhaiya, it hurts."

Inaaya's voice. But not quite. Older. Sadder. Like she had been waiting for years to say those words.

"You built this prison yourself," came a voice from the doorway.

Falguni stood there, sari fraying at the edges like it was slowly dissolving. Her eyes carried decades of regret, heavy as stones at the bottom of a well. But she looked different now. Translucent. Tired in a way that sleep could never fix.

"You died in this room, Kiaan. September 12th, 1999. You were barely twenty then." Her voice cracked like old paper. "Broke in to steal gold jewelry for Inaaya's first surgery. The balcony railing gave way under your weight. You fell three floors onto the courtyard concrete."

The walls around them began to leak black ink, spelling out INAAYA in desperate, dripping letters that ran down like tears. Kiaan's hands started bleeding from invisible wounds, bruises blooming across his arms like dark flowers opening in time-lapse.

"I am alive," he gasped, though the words tasted like lies on his tongue.

Falguni's face crumpled with an ancient sadness. "Beta, you are a ghost. Just like me. My shradh ritual after the fire went wrong. I meant to trap the people who betrayed my family, who let us burn. Instead, I trapped souls like yours. The CCTV system does not just record the living. It archives the dead."

The apartment walls began to crack, revealing glimpses of something vast and dark beyond. Naraka, maybe. The place where guilty souls go to relive their worst moments until they learn to let go.

"Confess your truth to the living," Falguni whispered. "It is the only way to break the loop. The only way to save Inaaya from becoming part of this place."

THE CONFESSION

Kiaan lived in the guardroom now, afraid to leave, afraid to stay. Viraj vanished after their conversation, his apartment cleared out like he had never existed. When Kiaan checked the employment records, there was no mention of anyone named Viraj ever working at Skyview Towers.

In the security office's cracked mirror, he watched his reflection age and decay in fast-forward. Wrinkles appearing like cracks in old leather, blood trickling from his hairline, mouth frozen in a silent scream that never ended. He stopped looking at mirrors entirely.

The locket burned hotter each day, like it was counting down to something. Inaaya's voice changed in his head, growing more desperate: "Live for me, bhaiya. Please just live."

But when her hospital bed flickered on the security monitors at random hours, he could see her heart rate slowing. The machines that kept her alive were failing, just like they had been twenty-six years ago when he had made his desperate choice.

The server room lay in the building's basement, a concrete tomb humming with cables that writhed like the serpents of Patala. Warning signs in Hindi and English covered the walls like desperate prayers: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE. DO NOT ENTER UNLESS YOU ARE READY TO FACE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE.

Kiaan entered anyway.

The screens inside glowed with Sanskrit text that pulsed like a dying heartbeat: 'Sach kaho ya jeete raho. Jhooth bolo ya marte raho.' Speak truth or live forever in lies. Speak lies or die forever in truth.

He had to reach the hard drive marked "13B // Falguni Arora // DO NOT DELETE." Three times he tried. Three times the cables lashed his wrists like whips, screens shrieking "YOU DIED! YOU DIED! YOU DIED!" in voices that sounded suspiciously like his own.

Each attempt revealed another role he had played in this building's cursed history. Delivery boy in 2007, face younger but eyes already desperate. Maintenance worker in 2013, still searching for a way to save his sister. Security guard in 2025, playing the same part in the same doomed story. Always the same face. Always the same desperate need for money. Always the same ending.

The final attempt showed footage from 1999. Kiaan, six years younger and ten times more foolish, climbing the balcony of 13B. Falguni's voice screaming from inside the apartment. Glass exploding outward as the railing gave way. The sickening crack of bones hitting concrete that echoed through twenty-six years of guilt.

The mirror in the server room reflected his current face, but now he could see through it. Transparent. Fading like old photographs left in sunlight.

Footsteps echoed in the hallway above. Ojasvi Sharma, the new night guard, called down: "Kiaan? What is happening down there? The alarms are going crazy upstairs."

She appeared in the doorway, twenty-two years old, engineering dropout, bright-eyed and curious about everything. She reminded him painfully of Inaaya, back when his sister still believed her big brother could fix anything.

He looked at her through the smoke and static, this girl who still had choices, who still had time to make different mistakes than his.

"I died in this building," he said, his voice raw and broken like he had been screaming for decades. "Twenty-six years ago. Flat 13B. I was trying to steal money for my sister's surgery. The balcony railing broke… I fell. I have been haunting this place ever since, trapping people in the same cycle of desperation that killed me."

The cables snapped back from his arms like they had been burned. The screens went dark one by one, their electronic screams fading to whispers. His hand was already fading, becoming mist and memory.

Ojasvi stared, eyes wide as saucers, as he pressed the silver locket into her palm.

"I am sorry," he whispered, and dissolved into static and regret.

The server hummed once, displaying a single line of text: 'Soul freed. Archives updated. System reset.'

THE JUDGEMENT

Ojasvi sat in the guardroom, hands trembling as she stared at the monitors. She had found footage from two days before her first day of work. Kiaan was there, welcoming her with a smile that now seemed impossibly sad, handing her a cup of chai she had never actually received.

"Welcome to Skyview Towers," his recorded voice said to a camera that showed only empty space where she should have been standing.

But she had never met him before that night in the server room. Had she?

The locket in her palm opened with a soft click that sounded like a heart finally stopping. Inside was a photograph of a young girl in a hospital bed, smiling despite the tubes and wires. On the back, someone had written in handwriting that looked suspiciously like Kiaan's: 'Inaaya Kapoor - The reason for everything.'

A new feed flickered to life on the main monitor. A hospital room, clean and bright and somehow more real than anything else she had seen that night. The same girl from the photograph, older now, stirring awake in her bed. Her heart monitor showed a strong, steady rhythm for the first time in twenty-six years.

Ojasvi whispered, "Thank you."

A final message appeared on the blank monitor, typed in the same desperate script that had covered Kiaan's notepad:

'If you see her bringing chai at 12:13 AM, you are already part of the story.'

The building settled around her with a sigh that sounded almost like relief. Somewhere in the distance, she could swear she heard the faint jingle of silver anklets growing fainter with each step.

!

NOTE: The rule was simple — never look back more than 24 hours. Kiaan broke it and found himself trapped in twenty-six years of yesterday. Sometimes the only way forward is to confess the truth of where you have been.